On 15 May 1924, ‘Ubayd al- Ḥājj al-Amīn, Ḥassan Ṣāliḥ, Ḥassan Sharīf, Ṣāliḥ ‘Abd al-Qādir sent the first of a long series of telegrams:

We beg toconveyqance [sic] of this our protest to both the Egyption and British Parliments.Our dignity will not permit us to be biught and sold like animals who have no voice in their disposal. We protest with all our might that our people are not given the legal freedom to speak openly and demand that those who will be selected by the nation from her loyal sons should at least be made aware of the real decision onsettlement of their future duriong the Negotiation. It is for one but them, Whatever the State may be, be to settle the question of its future, because the word is for the nation alone, and she is the owner of the right.

This telegram inaugurated a protest strategy – the telegrams, petitions, and circulars campaign – that would become a hallmark of the 1924 Revolution. The campaign was intended to communicate the core values of the national movement to a wider public: the values for which the nationalists were ready, to use their own words, to ‘sacrifice’ themselves.

This chapter has been created from a repertoire of 85 texts composed of telegrams, petitions, and circulars sent in 1924. Some of the most significant are reported in Appendix 1. These texts are the only surviving documents written by political activists of 1924 while the events were actually taking place. In general, most of the existing Sudanese accounts were produced decades after the events. For this reason, they do not grasp the evolution of the movement's ideology in a comparable way as the political texts written during 1924 do.

With four exceptions, the texts are English translations of original Arabic documents that I was not able to locate in any of the archives I consulted. The quality of the translations varies a great deal, and is often poor, but only in a few cases does this hinder the comprehension of the document. Because of their nature as draft translations, a semantic analysis of these sources can only be approximate; the way in which I will approach them will therefore be to map the contents of the texts, analyse their circulation and readership, and finally trace their evolution and the way in which that sheds light on the history of the tense months of 1924.